This invention relates generally to exercise equipment for those who are handicapped and more particularly, to therapeutic exercise equipment useful in enhancing a handicapped child's ability to maintain balance and proper posture.
The ability to maintain balance is fundamental to more advanced perceptual motor activities. Balance mechanisms, along with vision, tactile information and proprioceptor feedback, provide the knowledge for perceiving body orientation in space. Balance, defined as the ability to maintain equilibrium while engaging in various locomotor or non-locomotor activities, may be partially or totally deficient in some children. In particular, neurologically impaired children, such as those suffering from cerebral palsy or muscular dystrophy, often lack those postural adjustments and equilibrium reactions which comprise the basic movement patterns necessary for balance and proper posture.
An individual's equilibrium is used to regain shifted. Equilibrium reactions may be simple postural adjustments or more obvious protective reactions, for example, to stop a fall. In either case, these reactions are typically automatic or semi-automatic, working best when we do not need to think about them. Where these reactions are deficient, they must be taught or developed through appropriate physical therapy. Rhythmic movements involving the entire body assist best in developing these reactions or basic controls.
Today various types of therapeutic exercise equipment or apparatus are available to assist a therapist in initiating controlled postural and equilibrium reactions in the body of a handicapped child. Unfortunately, most, if not all, existing apparatus is designed to initiate only a specific type of movement, e.g., a rocking, rotating or swinging movement. As a result, a therapist must typically own a number of different types of exercise equipment to be able to provide a child with a full range of physical therapy. This is especially problematic today since the enactment of the Education for all Handicapped Children Act of 1975, Public Law No. 94-142, which requires that all children have an equal right to an education, including an equal right to physical therapy when needed. Thus, today a physical therapist is often required to travel from school to school to meet with a multitude of children, and in the process typically must transport a variety of needed exercise apparatus with him.
Thus, a need exists today for compact therapeutic exercise equipment capable of being used to initiate a wide range of different postural and equilibrium reactions in the body of a handicapped child, both of a higher and lower level of difficulty.